Radio review

Thursday 29 March 2001 19.57 EST
First published on Thursday 29 March 2001 19.57 EST

Despite the title of the new series Paul Weller's Vinyl Classics (Radio 2), you half expect his dad to be presenting. So notoriously unseeking of public attention is Weller that he has in the past sent Pops to collect awards on his behalf. But Weller Jr it is, barely, linking life-affirming jazz, soul and R'n'B tunes from his mammoth vinyl collection.

Taking a letting-the-music-do-the-talking approach to this presenting malarkey, Weller sounds a bit grumpy to be talking at all. "Those screams at the end say it all for me, really", he murmurs after a Wilson Pickett tune, as if he wishes they could.

There's no doubt about Weller's passion for the music, though. It might be hard to imagine him "jumping round the living room" to these tunes as he says he does, but he does reveal his love affair with vinyl in other, quietly endearing ways. He alliteratively embellishes his favourites - "the wicked Wilson Pickett", "the mighty Curtis Mayfield" - and finds himself in a relative flood of words mid-anecdote. Mayfield, "like a little Buddha" when Weller met him, was "one of the few people who when he said 'Peace and Love' to you, actually meant it."

But best of all, and Weller knows this, are the tunes themselves, short slivers of emotion with titles such as What My Baby Needs Now Is A Little More Lovin', We Must Be In Love and Let's Do It Again. They suggest a world in which love can repair all, where Gs can be left off of the end of words; a world, frankly, that is nothing nastier than a great big onion.

Across the miles and decades, in contemporary South Africa, more intractable problems present themselves. In Crossing Continents (Radio 4), Tim Whewell packed three strong stories into 30 minutes, looking at inter-racial adoption, and new no-frills banks for the majority of South Africans not served by traditional ones.

Whewell visited new mixed-race comedy clubs, too, talking to comedians confronting stereotypes in the belief that a nation that can laugh together can live together. You could hear comedy creaking under the pressure to do good, to heal rather than divide as jokes tend to. An exception was Marc Lottering and his act based on life in the Cape Flats shantytowns. Commonalities rather than differences are his target and that means doilies (yes, doilies).

Whewell goes to meet the Doily Queen, Lottering's mother, who fills her humble home with these universal symbols of suburban respectability. One is so big, "we had no choice but to call it The Doil", says Lottering in his act. "It's a massive piece of crochet-work," Whewell gasps, with an audible enthusiasm Paul Weller could learn from.